On the evening of April 1st, at about 10pm, I completed the public transport leg of my journey home at Liverpool Street station in the City of London, only to find nearly every exit blocked. One was still open and it allowed people to spill out of the station on streets around it. But access to the main thoroughfare outside the station - Broadgate - was blocked by a line of riot police holding batons and truncheons.

The street they were "protecting" was empty, their threatening presence - intimidating "ordinary" (because of course protestors are actually extra terrestrials) commuters - was obviously a variant on the sinister crowd control technique known as "kettling".

I found myself standing there looking at the cops and the empty street beyond and went "off on one", as they say. I found myself saying this whole thing was a sham, a lie - symptomatic of a scared, morally bankrupt authority, unable to answer for the abject failing of the capitailist system they propogated, determined to pick a war with its own people.
People who in this instance just wanted to get home.

I had not been protesting that day but, prevented from getting my bike, locked on a bikestand across the street, I now found myself protesting, volubly.

As I spoke my mind I noticed a riot cop sweating under his helmet, red faced, eyes flaming, twitching. It wasnt hard to see what could easily happen. A look or a word out of place and, with the tensions of the day peaking, an on edge cop with a truncheon was the last thing I needed.
So I  spoke my thoughts more gently and began to back away.

Later I heard the terrible news about the death of Ian Tomlinson - a newspaper seller looking to get home after a days work, ruthlessly beaten, hours before his death, by the same police force given legal clearance for the killing of Brazilian Jean Charles De Mendez.

I realised what happened to Ian could have happened to anyone unfortunate enough to encounter a testosterone heavy riot cop looking to expend all that twisted, hyped up anger. Anger that'd been hyped up by a corporate media and government anxious to deflect attention away from the failings of the system they had so obsequiously supported.

The cops were from the  same policeforce who , some 27 years ago, had me surrounded in an interview room in the police station opposite Liverpool Street, asking, I still recall with a chill, if, growing up in Northern Ireland, I'd ever had 'an armalite up my arse.'

So when a protest march was held last Saturday - from my local tube station to the place where Ian died in the city of London I had to be there.
I made a special protest soundtrack up for the occasion, to be played on my soundbox.

I figure that music was one of the most joyful and primal weapons people have to use in the age old battles against injustice and thuggery . Unfortunately I was not aware that the march in Ian's memory was a silent sombre protest.

So - until the speeches were over and the reefs were laid and I blasted out Roland Rashaan Kirk's exuberant jazz instrumental reimagining of  "I Say A Little Prayer" (which he recorded to mark the assassination of Martin Luther King) - the soundtrack went unheard.

Then I walked down to the river where the the Tamil community was mounting a 200,000 strong  march to protests state genocide in Sri lanka.
It was an awesome sight. I sat on the wall by the river as the people filed by, playing my music in support. But music must be of the people and for the people, I soon realised that  Tom Petty singing "(You Don't Have To Live Like A) Refugee" could be open to misinterpretation. In anycase, once the drummers appeared, playing a Tamil variant of the barrel shaped Indian Dohl drums, my soundbox was surplus to requirements.

But the most sustained musical protest I would witness that day came later when walking home along the strand I encountered the longterm vigil being held outside Zimbabwe House. As a permanent stationary protest the Zimbabwe House had advantages in mounting musical protest.
The feat of getting 200,000, mainly native, folk on the Tamil march must have taken much concentration and organization -  making music on the move a secondary consideration.

But at the Zimbabwe vigil there was the the best singing, the best rhythms beaten out on the drum and the most dazzling athletic dancing Id encountered all day. This was all the things music can and does still do - providing an expression of community resistance, a celebration of being alive, a way of lifting the collective spirit. Singing, dancing, making music to  lift hearts and minds to what is REALLY going on? This is not nothing - its a fundamental expression of being alive - connected to a deep noble past. And long may the singing the dancing and the music making continue - wherever people are tackling injustice.

As riot police guard empty streets of London's financial district, brutalise innocent citizens, curtail freedom of movement and expression the music becomes more important. The singing, the dancing, the music making are fundamental human rights. They need to be exercised - before someone decides to make them illegal.
 

Words - Gavin Martin

Photo from flickr user - IanVisits